Posted by Chuck Egerton / at Monday, April 12, 2010 / /

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Southern Discomfort

By JON MEACHAM

Published: April 10, 2010

IN 1956, nearly a century after Fort Sumter, Robert Penn Warren went on assignment for Life magazine, traveling throughout the South after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions. Racism was thick, hope thin. Progress, Warren reported, was going to take a while — a long while. “History, like nature, knows no jumps,” he wrote, “except the jump backward, maybe.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opinion/11meacham.html